Browser War 2.0

Microsoft destroyed Netscape less than a decade ago to emerge winner in the browser war 1.0. Since than there had been no big competitor for the mighty Redmond till Firefox came on the scene a few years ago and started nibbling at Microsoft’s share. Being an open source product, Firefox lacked the might and muscle of a big corporation, so despite being a much superior product, it is still number two in the browser world. But this can change with Google Chrome, which was announced yesterday. Based on the information provided in the Chrome comic strip, the product claims to address a lot of issues with today’s browsers and comes with higher security, multi-processor support, JavaScript VM, a new look UI, etc. and plays out to Google’s strengths (yes, it is designed to make search very pervasive to the whole browsing/web application usage.) This can play out browser war 1.0 in reverse with Microsoft playing the role of Netscape and Google raiding the Redmond from multiple corners.

But is it really all about browser per se? Though having a great next generation browser that can run current and future web applications much better that IE and Firefox is a nice goal but is that all about what Chrome can do? I think it can hurt Microsoft where it pains most – in its OS business. Look at what applications most of the people use on the PCs/Laptops today – office productivity tools (aka MS Office), Mail Client (aka MS Outlook) and a wide array of applications that run inside the browser (MS IE) and all this runs on top of a MS provided OS. The role of OS (aka Windows) here is to make sure these applications run efficiently and that’s where the Redmond behemoth makes most of it’s money by arm twisting every PC manufacturer to preinstall Windows on most of the PCs they sell. So each PC sold is money for Microsoft. Now let’s apply some new rules – you have a MS Office replacement in Google Documents, which all run inside the browser unlike MS software, you can use any browser based mail client (Yahoo! Mail or Google GMail or Thunderbird) to access your mail and you can have Google Chrome running all your web based applications much better, secure and faster than IE. Now why do you need Windows? Why not install a free OS like Linux and run all these applications on it and don’t pay even a penny to Microsoft? This can be the new world order. And Google is playing a clever game to control the medium for application execution, just like what Microsoft did two decades ago to monopolize the software industry. Of course, the economic engines for the two are different but who cares as long as the mint keeps running.